Royal College of Surgeons

in Ireland

The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) is a statutory, not-for-profit university with an exclusive focus on medicine and health sciences. With over 4,600 students, 1,265 staff and 28,000 alumni across 98 countries, RCSI ranks in the top 250 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

The institution offers programmes from Undergraduate to Doctoral level and the college’s digital infrastructure spans multiple sites. The main campus comprises 11 buildings at St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, with approximately 140,000 square metres of space. The college also operates five remote campuses: Beaumont Hospital, Connolly Hospital, the Rotunda, Waterford Hospital and a Dentistry Centre in Sandyford.

they were physically located at St Stephen’s Green. With daily exams, continuous research activities and cloud-based authentication systems, downtime is never an option. “We basically have a 100% uptime requirement,” says Kevin. “It just can’t go down.”Virgin Media Business provides dedicated point-to-point connectivity between RCSI’s St Stephen’s Green campus and the remote sites. This infrastructure includes two 10 Gigabit links to Beaumont; two 1 Gigabit links to each of Connolly Hospital, Waterford Hospital, the Rotunda and Sandyford Dentistry Centre; geographically redundant paths (one from the north, one from the south); and guaranteed bandwidth across Virgin’s core network.

The Virgin Media Business infrastructure supports a fully digital educational environment. All lectures, tutorials and assessments are laptop-based and on any given day, up to 9,000 devices connect to RCSI’s network.

Staff work in paper-free offices without traditional desk cables, relying entirely on WiFi. The college even authenticates WiFi access from the cloud. “From any of our locations, there is no difference in a user’s perception of how they’re connected to the internet. It’s the same everywhere,” Kevin explains. “If somebody is sitting in Waterford, the entire connectivity stream comes from a wireless access point that’s managed in the cloud.”

The Beaumont site presents particularly demanding requirements. As a full research centre where Covid-19 research took place during the pandemic, it houses freezers containing samples that require constant monitoring.

“If there’s any gap in the monitoring, they can’t use that sample for research,” says Kevin. “I took it down once for two days for modifications and a colleague had to physically monitor those freezers to make sure the temperature never rose above minus 80 degrees.”

Staff can work at any RCSI site with identical network performance. Students logging onto WiFi at remote locations route every transaction through the Virgin Media Business links and low latency matters as much as bandwidth. “The ping times and the latencies are extremely important,” Kevin explains. “It’s basically like stretching a building 150 kilometres away. To deliver that you need super-reliable fibre connections with zero compromise. Even if that went down for a minute, it would cause disruption.”

RCSI’s IT department comprises 52 people, including 7 staff who manage the IT infrastructure and an Application Development Team. The ticketing system and desktop management is sub-contracted to a third party and the college uses support partners to assist with monitoring and managing some of the network.

RCSI has maintained its relationship with Virgin Media Business for over ten years. For Kevin Brew, the deciding factor is reliability and support. “A big deal for me is the support. Ideally, these things don’t go down. I never want to have to call somebody but if I do, I want it to be dealt with quickly. I think that’s why we’ve partnered with Virgin Media Business for so long.”